Pakistan’s Offensive, America’s Withdrawal

For five years or more, the United States has been urging Pakistan to clear North Waziristan, a semi-autonomous tribal agency along the Afghan border, of foreign fighters and Taliban. North Waziristan has been a deep haven for Arab, Central Asian, Punjabi, Taliban, and sectarian militants, and the headquarters of the Haqqani network, an Afghan Taliban faction that has repeatedly bombed and gunned down civilians in Kabul. Insurgents trying to overthrow the Pakistani state have also launched one bloody attack after another from North Waziristan. Most recently, a few weeks ago, a team of Uzbek fighters shocked the country by killing more than two dozen people during a suicide-by-police-style-raid on Karachi’s international airport.

This week, the Pakistani military finally moved. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced the launch of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, named in reference to a sword of the Prophet Muhammad. The Army, in its own announcement, called it a “comprehensive operation against foreign and local terrorists” who “had been disrupting our national life in all its dimensions.” It vowed to “eliminate these terrorists, regardless of their hue and color.”

In the opening days of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, Pakistani F-16s have bombed forested mountains where some of the groups have camps. The Army claimed to have killed about two hundred opposition fighters. The C.I.A. has apparently launched several drone strikes near Miran Shah and in other areas of the agency this week, reviving its secret air war over North Waziristan after a long period of quietude. These strikes were almost certainly commissioned and supported by Pakistan’s military and intelligence services; it would seem unthinkable for the Obama Administration to act unilaterally with drones just when Pakistan was at last doing what it had long urged.

Why now? The Karachi airport attack was a precipitating event, but there have been many such outrages. The deeper answer involves America’s impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to the military officers, advisers, and civilian analysts I’ve spoken to here.

I happened to be in Pakistan when Zarb-e-Azb began. The country’s proliferating cable news channels (absent the largest, Geo, which has been suspended temporarily for earlier broadcasting reports that the military found offensive) instantly rolled out colorful BREAKING NEWS and nation-at-war graphics that make Fox News look restrained. Animated tanks, fighter jets, and armed trucks zipped across the bottom of the TV screen at random moments during talk shows. As field reporters delivered standups in split-screen boxes, animated F-16s flew bombing runs, over and over, as if to induce hypnosis. The cartoon planes bombed into smithereens an artist’s rendering of a mud-walled desert compound.

In Islamabad, the 111th Infantry Brigade, known as the “coup brigade” because its proximity to the capital has led it to execute the Army’s periodic takeovers of government, has deployed with the paramilitary Rangers to strengthen the city’s defenses in the capital against an expected backlash of terrorist attacks. Islamabad was already a city that had gotten used to barbed wire, barricades, and checkpoints; now there are more of those, and more roving armed patrols as well.

The Army has cordoned off North Waziristan and imposed curfews while it attempts to evacuate tens of thousands of civilians to camps outside the tribal agency. If similar military campaigns carried out in recent years in South Waziristan, Swat, and Bajaur are any guide, North Waziristan’s residents, already among Pakistan’s very poorest, are in for a prolonged period of suffering as internal refugees.

North Waziristan lies across the border from the Afghan provinces of Khost and Paktia. For several years, Pakistan’s Army has been forecasting quietly that the American effort to quickly build the Afghan National Army from scratch into a fighting force of at least two hundred and fifty thousand would fail. Eventually, Pakistan’s military high command fears, the United States and its allies will grow tired of paying the Afghan Army’s huge salary and equipment bills (perhaps four billion dollars a year), and then the country’s Army and police will unravel into factional militias, much as Iraq’s American-trained Army has melted away under pressure during the past few weeks. Pakistan’s greatest concrete security concern is how such an Afghan unravelling might spill into its territory.

Afghanistan is in the midst of an uncertain election transition this year. The votes haven’t been counted in last weekend’s runoff round, but one of the two candidates, Abdullah Abdullah, has already alleged that there was fraud on a grand scale. The great majority of American troops will be gone by the end of 2014. Pakistan’s Army wanted to move in North Waziristan now so that it can push forward military defensive lines along its western border against the possible Afghan chaos to come.

Among other things, Pakistan’s generals fear what is sometimes referred to as the “reverse sanctuary” problem—that is, rather than Pakistan providing sanctuary for anti-Afghan fighters, as it has done for several decades, Afghanistan might become a durable sanctuary for anti-Pakistan groups. Indeed, the current chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Mullah Fazlullah, is said to be hiding out in northeastern Afghanistan, along with other armed radicals.

What of the Haqqani network, a tacit ally of Pakistan and a scourge of American generals in Afghanistan? The Haqqanis previously were the main instrument of Pakistan’s forward strategy in North Waziristan. They provided a loyal but imperfect front line—loyal because the Haqqanis studiously avoided attacking the Pakistani state, but imperfect because they harbored other groups that did hit Pakistan.

There is no reason to assume that Pakistan has turned on the Haqqanis. But the Army may prefer to push the network’s fighters, at least for a while, into eastern Afghanistan, where they also control territory. (They are, after all, Afghans.) The Haqqanis’ evacuation from their strongholds around Miran Shah would create space for Pakistan to attack the North Waziristan-rooted groups that it loathes most of all—the Uzbeks, Chechens, Uighurs (who spook Pakistan’s critical ally, China), and certain virulent and irreconcilable Pakistani Taliban. According to Pakistani intelligence estimates, there may be about two thousand Uzbek fighters and hundreds of Punjabi Taliban in North Waziristan today—those groups alone promise tough going.

Pakistan gained independence in 1947. It left Waziristan alone until 2002, when the Pakistani Army entered in force for the first time, also at American urging. That incursion began falteringly, but more recently the Army has gained confidence and some measure of stability in South Waziristan, if hardly a victory. The Army would like to pull back and put civilian administrators and perhaps political parties in the lead. But Pakistan’s civil government is too weak, and Waziristan’s insurgent, criminal, and terrorist networks are too deep to expect normalcy anytime soon. Even in the best of circumstances, Pakistan’s military occupation of all of Waziristan now looks to be a multi-decade project, akin to the Indian occupation of Kashmir or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank—a heavy load on a state that already has too many.

Photograph by Shakil Adil/AP.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.